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Most likely you wont get any response from them. And what does twitting the founder of Rogue about strife being on amazon help, since Rogue never owned Strife? Velocity did.

Dunno, I didn't do it.

The only party involved with any weight would be ZeniMax, for their ownership of the Doom-derived portions of the code. But I'd rather have no dealing with those ravenous wolves. Trying to employ them to my own designs would more than likely get me eaten as well, or the entire Chocolate Doom project, or maybe even the whole source port development community. At the end of the day, it's not worth the risk to me or others. Just let this guy get his couple hundred bucks he might make total off this and call it a day.

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What has contacting the Strife devs achieved? Well, we have some relative confidence that the version for sale on Amazon is not legitimate (and should not be recommended); it also looks like legal action is now underway to get it taken down. Seems like a pretty good result to me.

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What has contacting the Strife devs achieved? Well, we have some relative confidence that the version for sale on Amazon is not legitimate (and should not be recommended); it also looks like legal action is now underway to get it taken down. Seems like a pretty good result to me.

Well, if you just look at the Strife loading screen, it says, Copyright, Velocity Inc., all rights reserved. Rogue is mentioned as the developer. And the story goes that Velocity hired Rogue to developer the game, after the previous developer they hired to do it quit on them. Rogue did the work as work-for-hire, it was never their game. It was Velocity's, the publisher.

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The only party involved with any weight would be ZeniMax, for their ownership of the Doom-derived portions of the code. But I'd rather have no dealing with those ravenous wolves. Trying to employ them to my own designs would more than likely get me eaten as well, or the entire Chocolate Doom project, or maybe even the whole source port development community. At the end of the day, it's not worth the risk to me or others. Just let this guy get his couple hundred bucks he might make total off this and call it a day.

I dont like Zenimax either. I agree, well, the code is safe, Zenimax at least lets GPL software co-exist with them, after all, they allowed doom3 and doom3 bfg to be GPL'ed.

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Well, if you just look at the Strife loading screen, it says, Copyright, Velocity Inc., all rights reserved. Rogue is mentioned as the developer. And the story goes that Velocity hired Rogue to developer the game, after the previous developer they hired to do it quit on them. Rogue did the work as work-for-hire, it was never their game. It was Velocity's, the publisher.

The story is WAY more complicated than that.

Rich Fleider, Jim Molinets, and Brandon James (IIRC?) started working on the idea for Strife at Cygnus Studios, which was affiliated with Apogee in some way. id Software was to be the publisher for this project, just like they had been for Heretic and Hexen.

Cygnus tried to pull the plug on the project, why I don't know (maybe something to do with a competing project would be my best conjecture). There was an internal revolt; everyone at Cygnus pretty much quit and id helped them found a new company - in the same building, and putting in place several of their pals - James Monroe and Tim Willits included - Rogue Entertainment.

Unfortunately id was now heavily preoccupied with the development of Quake to deal with publishing Strife, so, Rogue had to find a publisher for their idea. They found Velocity, Inc, of San Fran. California, previous devs of the Spectre (VR) series and various other lesser known titles.

I suppose as part of the publishing agreement, Velocity demanded that some or all of the rights to the Strife IP be assigned to them. However, then Velocity tanked after its release. Nobody can figure out where its assets went. Were they sold off, or did they slip into oblivion and become orphaned works? The latter seems the most likely circumstance. Rogue survived for several more years but never published their originally planned sequel to Strife since the IP rights weren't secure.

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Well, if you just look at the Strife loading screen, it says, Copyright, Velocity Inc., all rights reserved. Rogue is mentioned as the developer. And the story goes that Velocity hired Rogue to developer the game, after the previous developer they hired to do it quit on them. Rogue did the work as work-for-hire, it was never their game. It was Velocity's, the publisher.

I don't think we know the full details of who owns what. Quasar obviously has the best handle on this but unless we get the story directly from the Rogue folks themselves, I don't think we can make any assumptions.

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Isn't any company suppose to take potential liabilities on their end seriously? They're foolish not to. Also, I don't think it's worth discussing non-transferable licenses, as it wasn't the case when it was originally distributed, and has not been officially distributed at all since then.

fraggle said:

it also looks like legal action is now underway to get it taken down

As of my writing this post, it's still up. I'm not interested in the details, confidential or not, but can it be confirmed that something is in the works?

Quasar said:

[Zenimax] would more than likely get me eaten as well, or the entire Chocolate Doom project, or maybe even the whole source port development community.

In that event, I propose that we pelt their headquarters with manure from a helicopter! (that, or protest the boring way)

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In that event, I propose that we pelt their headquarters with manure from a helicopter! (that, or protest the boring way)

Or change the copyright laws. We need a means of releasing orphaned works to the public domain and I don't see why corporations should be allowed to sit on old IP until it's a certifiable antique that might only be of interest to technology museums.

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Or change the copyright laws. We need a means of releasing orphaned works to the public domain and I don't see why corporations should be allowed to sit on old IP until it's a certifiable antique that might only be of interest to technology museums.

I fully agree with both points.

However, the manure comment was both a joke (as I'm sure you know) and a reference to a hypothetical scenario if Zenimax attempts to retract the GPL licensing on the id engines. I wonder, can they even legally do that since it's been out under the GPL for years before they acquired id?

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Legally no. My point in saying that is that the DMCA is regularly abused by powerful corporations and special interests who regard themselves as relatively safe or even immune to prosecution because of their vast money, dog-sled team of lawyers, or actual legislated immunities.

If ZeniMax or whoever you want to use as an example sends your webhost a DMCA, the onus is on you to prove you are NOT violating their rights. It's a deliberately asymmetric system that favors big money and big media.

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Or change the copyright laws. We need a means of releasing orphaned works to the public domain and I don't see why corporations should be allowed to sit on old IP until it's a certifiable antique that might only be of interest to technology museums.

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What has contacting the Strife devs achieved? Well, we have some relative confidence that the version for sale on Amazon is not legitimate (and should not be recommended); it also looks like legal action is now underway to get it taken down. Seems like a pretty good result to me.

If Rogue is the legitimate rights owner of Strife, why havent they re-released it commercially themselves? They're not the only ones at least, that's why. And that's why that guy's tweet saying that his lawyers are on it sounds like BS to me. And worse, he works for Gearbox now, a piece of dog crap company owned by an asshole named Randy Pitchford.

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However, the manure comment was both a joke (as I'm sure you know) and a reference to a hypothetical scenario if Zenimax attempts to retract the GPL licensing on the id engines. I wonder, can they even legally do that since it's been out under the GPL for years before they acquired id?

They can't, you can't re-license something. What they could do is make a copy of the gpl code and put that copy under a propietary license, like for example if someone wanted a closed license agreement with the code like in the old days of licensing id tech.

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Rich Fleider, Jim Molinets, and Brandon James (IIRC?) started working on the idea for Strife at Cygnus Studios, which was affiliated with Apogee in some way. id Software was to be the publisher for this project, just like they had been for Heretic and Hexen.

Cygnus tried to pull the plug on the project, why I don't know (maybe something to do with a competing project would be my best conjecture). There was an internal revolt; everyone at Cygnus pretty much quit and id helped them found a new company - in the same building, and putting in place several of their pals - James Monroe and Tim Willits included - Rogue Entertainment.

Unfortunately id was now heavily preoccupied with the development of Quake to deal with publishing Strife, so, Rogue had to find a publisher for their idea. They found Velocity, Inc, of San Fran. California, previous devs of the Spectre (VR) series and various other lesser known titles.

I suppose as part of the publishing agreement, Velocity demanded that some or all of the rights to the Strife IP be assigned to them. However, then Velocity tanked after its release. Nobody can figure out where its assets went. Were they sold off, or did they slip into oblivion and become orphaned works? The latter seems the most likely circumstance. Rogue survived for several more years but never published their originally planned sequel to Strife since the IP rights weren't secure.

Interesting story. I think works dont become orphaned by themselves, somebody owns them. In this case, probably 100 different parties own bits and pieces of it. I think interesting leads could be found on Velocity's old properties papers, if they still exist somewhere in a warehouse in San Francisco.